Getting Out of Dodge
Today we drove from Gallup, New Mexico to Dodge City, Kansas on our way to Kansas City tomorrow. You all remember Dodge City with Marshall Matt Dillon (James Arness), Doc (Millburn Stone), Chester (Dennis Weaver) and Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake) with her Long Branch Saloon. You might also remember the scruffy guy who seemed like a town bum, but would occasionally get deputized. That was Festus (Ken Curtis), who was not so scruffy in real life since he was the son of a Colorado sheriff and started his career as a crooner in Tommy Dorsey’s big band. Gunsmoke was a pretty idealized version of the Wild West and I’m not so sure they advertised that it was in Kansas, but sure enough, this is where it is and it even still has Boot Hill, but now it lives next to an Applebee’s. Clearly the town still makes a few bucks off its cowboy legends, but this is also very much in the heartland of America and the drive here really reminded me of that.
After passing through Albuquerque, at the really middle-American town of Tucumcari, New Mexico, where we stopped for lunch at one of the many steak houses in this beef capital of North America, we turned off Highway 40 and started our diagonal trek up towards Route 70 and Kansas City. That involves a two-lane road called Rt. 54 and it goes from the the Northeastern part of New Mexico through the Northwest corner of Texas, across the Oklahoma Panhandle and into Southwestern Kansas. When you look at maps of the Dust Bowl, we were driving through its epicenter, where the wind literally blew away all the topsoils in the area from 1934 – 1940. When you drive through the area today you can understand how that all came to pass. The Great Plains of the United States is a large flat area where agriculture reins supreme, but nowhere is it flatter and more agricultural that this area we drove through today.
I figure on this 290 mile stretch we saw over 100 grain elevator co-ops and I estimate that at no time could we see less than ten miles in every direction with nothing but wide open fields of what must be wheat and/or hay growing. The irrigation systems out here sprawl for a half-mile or more and surely make the difference in avoiding the Dust Bowl aeolian process of wind erosion. You just know these are no family farms anymore out here but rather huge agribusiness complexes that are likely owned by public companies like ADM. I’m sure the science is such that with minimal human labor and maximum mechanization the productivity and contribution to our national food security is immense.
Running next to the road the entire length is a railroad line. I felt like My Cousin Vinny last night in Gallup, hearing the freight train whistles blow regularly through the night. This track seems to be a vestige of the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Line made famous by Johnny Mercer in 1946 with his song by that name for the movie, The Harvey Girls. While the Santa Fe line, as it was called, never really ran into Santa Fe, it was one of the big railroad lines of the American West. It was merged into Burlington Northern in 1996 and from the look of the tracks, business is still booming.
What really struck me was that all along the 290 mile length of track, every few miles, there was a stack of creosote-blackened old railroad ties that looked like they were ready to be picked up and hauled away. It was clear that the BN people are upgrading the tracks with new pre-stressed concrete ties along this length and putting down fresh gravel while they are at it. There are 3.250 ties used per mile of track, so that comes to almost one million ties that are stacked up along that rail line. I just bought a dozen old creosote railroad ties for building my Hobbit House and they cost about $30 apiece. That means those stacks of ties have a wholesale value of about $15 million and I’ll bet they are headed for a Home Depot store near you soon. Those ties weigh an average of 130 pounds each and will last 60-70 years or more thanks to the creosote. I couldn’t stop looking at those stacks and thinking about how strange it is that they have lasted so long and that a technology that is 150+ years old is still ore or less in use today with only minor upgrades. I like the thought that my Hobbit House was part of America’s railroad past and that all those ties can still be put to good use in gardens all around the country.
Today was a day that made me very happy that I chose once again to drive across the country rather than fly. To begin with, I heard all about the massive air traffic delays and cancellations over the weekend and that is enough to make me glad that I have four wheels on the ground. The other reason is that unlike hightailing it across Routes 40, 70 or 80, the interstates that whisk you most quickly across our land, when you ride the secondary roads as we did today, you really get to see the country at its best, or at least at its most real. Some might say that with the high price of gasoline, this is a no-win situation, but it hasn’t been that bad. I did get jogged in Needles, Arizona, where I had to pay $7.899/gallon for Premium, but that dropped by almost $2 by the time I got into New Mexico. I’m tempted to say that’s the difference between a red and blue state, but that’s not fair since, God knows, our gas prices in San Diego are no bargain either. But my math tells me that at 2,800 miles and 30 mpg for my big SUV, that means I am using 93 gallons of gas or $560 each way. We are using 3 hotels going and 5 coming home (we have some friends along the way that have kept those numbers low) and at an average of $160/night that means that gas and lodging is cost us $2,400 for the trip. I won’t count food since we would be eating any which way. We should deduct the cost of a three-week car rental if we flew, so I’m going to suggest that with the cost of flights and the cost of car rentals these days, we are net/net probably saving quite a bit of money driving, even at inflated gas prices. But that is not why we are doing it.
I happen to like driving and have already listened to two audiobooks so far with more on tap for the next few days of driving. I don’t read enough any more and this helps me catch up. We’ve listened to the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction book, Less, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and we are now listening to River of the Gods about the search during the Nineteenth Century for the headwaters of the Nile River. It’s all fascinating to me AND I get to see the best scenery in the world while I’m listening.
Tomorrow it will be time to get out of Dodge and head for KC. I expect more great audiobooks , more great scenery and more great communing with the country that I have always loved and want to continue to love (note the non-political nature of that statement, please).